The Bloody bucket Bridge is a bridge located
in Wauchula, Florida, that demonstrates how urban legends andghost
storiescan
quite rapidly evolve. According to the bookWeird
Florida, a freed black slave took up midwifery after the
Civil War. But she killed dozens of the babies she delivered, and
somehow no one noticed right away.

Eventually
she went mad from guilt of killing all those babies (of course she must
not have been playing with a full deck to begin with. Der hey.), and
started to think her mop bucket filled with blood. She would dump the
bucket out on a bridge, only to have it fill back up with blood again.
(Urban) Legend says if you go to the bridge on the night of the full
moon, you can see the river below turn to blood! Muhahahaha!

The
Bloody Bucket Bridge must date
back to at least Civil War times, if the legend is true. So what does
this old, scary bridge look like? It looks like this:

Now you're
probably thinking, "Wait the bridge doesn't look like it dates back to
the Civil War." That's because it doesn't. It was built in 1970!
I've heard there was a bridge before that built in 1950, but even so a freed slave would still have been
around their 90s back when that bridge was built.

Now for the
real truth: The bridge is actually called Griffin Road Bridge, and it
wasn't built until the 20thcentury.
Prior to that, there was no bridge! In the 1940's, before Hardee County
became a dry county, there existed a bar on Griffin Road (located at a
curve before it runs into Miller Road) called “The Big Apple”. It was a
rough and tumble kind of place, where you'd go to get a drink of rot
gut and try not to get in a knife fight. It was a real place, and I've
talked to several old timers who went to the bar in their younger,
rowdier days. Because of the fights that often occurred in
the place, it was nicked named “The Bloody Bucket”, and the name
stuck.

The bar went out of business after the
county went dry in the 50's, and the building was torn down. Even so,
the curve in the road where the bar once stood was still called “The
Bloody Bucket”. When I moved to Florida as a kid in the 80's,the
sitewhere
the bar once stood was still called “The Bloody Bucket” even
then, and anyone could tell you it was named after a bar.
There's still to this day aconcrete
slabon
the ground onthe
sitethat
people said was the bar's floor.

Griffin Road
is nicknamed “Bloody Bucket Road” and the bridge on Griffith Road over
the Peace River became known as “Bloody Bucket Bridge” solely for that
reason, and that reason alone!

The story about the midwife killing
babies is a load of tripe. No one in Wauchla ever heard of that story
before the bookWeird
Floridawas
published. Not only that, it's just plain impossible even without the
supernaturalstuff.
For one thing, the people of that era in Florida had their own ways of
dealing out frontier justice.

I knew a local historian who told me how his great-grandfather's
brother had been killed by an Indian, and then later avenged his death.
He spotted the Indian one day crossing a creek, started fighting him,
and finally killed the Indian by stabbing him to death with his pocket
knife. That's the kind of people they were...they were tough, because
they had to be tosurvivein the
19thcenturyfrontiers
of Florida!

If there was a woman killing
babies, she would have been hanged on the spot, regardless of
color...and people of colorcertainlyhad a
hard enough time back then not being killed by Whites just for the
sheer Hell of it. Look up thehistoryof a
town called Rosemont, Florida, and see of you still think a Black
midwife could kill dozens of White babies and get away with it in the
19thcentury!

So, either the authors of Weird
Florida invented the story, along with the “life long
resident” mentioned in the book who allegedly gave them the tale, or
they were very misinformed. The story circulated on the Internet, and
now there are many younger residents of Wauchula who are repeating the
“murdering midwife” myth.

Blinky the Baphomet says,

"That's
just one ghost storycreated
out of thin air, rather than ectoplasm. I imagine plenty of others are
created the same way!"

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